Free Forgotten Land by Max Egremont

Townsend stated, ‘a Baltic tribe, akin to the modern Lithuanians or Latvians’. In medieval Europe, the Wends, the so-called West Slavs, lived to the west of these old Prussians, between the rivers Elbe and Oder. There must have been movement of people, spurred by trade along the Baltic coast, in fur, fish and amber. Then, after the conquest of the old Prussians by the Teutonic Knights, Slavic Poles moved into the newly Christianized lands, chiefly into Masuria, the south-eastern part of what became East Prussia.
    Racial identities quickly became blurred yet provided reason enough for conflict. The eleventh-century German chronicler Adam of Bremen described areas of tension that were still being fought over by Poles, Germans and Russians in the twentieth century. In his history of Königsberg, Fritz Gause, director of the city’s archives and museums at the end of the war, says that Slav settlements came under the early influence of German or Goth culture from the land by the River Vistula or further south; Gause’s use of the word Kultur – the opposite of barbarity – is surely significant. Heinrich Himmler, an amateur archaeologist, came to the East Prussian estate of the Dohna family in the 1930s to examine some remains nearby, hoping for evidence of original Germanic settlement.
    To Fritz Gause, the Teutonic Knights’ campaign was heroic. But to Poles and Russians it could seem a precursor of the German forces of 1939 and 1941 that had the black cross of the Knights on their planes and tanks. The Knights – the Warrior Monks – combined force with self-denial. The crusade was brutal – but not more brutal than those in the Holy Land. It attracted knights from throughout Christendom, including the future King
Henry IV of England. The English kings Edward I and Edward III contributed to its costs. Chaucer’s ‘verray parfit gentil knyght’ went on a northern campaign or ‘Reise’.
    The northern crusaders needed extraordinary toughness, for the Baltic’s south-eastern edge was an inhospitable wilderness – a country of elk, bears and wolves, of long icy winters and intense short summers – a place, Frederick the Great thought later, unfit for humans. Red-brick castles began to appear, evidence of conquest; bishoprics were established at Marienwerder in 1243 and at Königsberg in 1255, the city that was named after King Ottokar of Bohemia (who had joined a crusade in 1254). Much of what became East Prussia was under the Knights’ control by the end of the thirteenth century and they pressed further east. In 1386 the baptism of the Lithuanian Prince Jagiełło, who also became King of Poland, began the conversion of Lithuania, the last pagan state in Europe.
    By 1409 there was conflict between the Polish-Lithuanians and the Teutonic Knights and, in 1410, at Grunwald, the Order was defeated and its grand master, Ulrich von Jungingen, killed. The 1410 battle became a symbol either of national triumph or of shame. It was fought near two villages, one called Grunwald, the other called Tannenberg. To the Poles and Lithuanians it became the victory of Grunwald; the Germans, however, took the other village’s name for what to them had been a defeat at the hands of the Slavs – Tannenberg. Five centuries later, in August 1914, when a German army defeated a Russian one near the site, the Germans called this the second battle of Tannenberg, as if to wipe the 1410 Slav victory of Grunwald off the map.
    The power of the Orders was waning when in 1511 Albrecht of Brandenburg-Anspach, from the Franconian family of Hohenzollern, with a Jagiełłon mother and King Zygmunt I Stary of Poland for an uncle, became Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights. Nineteenth-century Polish nationalists saw Albrecht’s public homage to his uncle the Polish King as a triumph; in fact, it freed Albrecht from the theocratic Orders and began the ascent
of Königsberg, his capital city. Albrecht held power for fifty-seven years, first as